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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28376154">Painted Eyes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coldest_Fire/pseuds/Cut%20Out%20Stars'>Cut Out Stars (Coldest_Fire)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>These Violent Ends [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Darkfic, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dissociation, Dissociation and possessing angelus, F/M, Her whole concept of self is bound up in a lot of trauma and this is the outcome, I've never used that tag, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Objectification, Out of Body Experiences, Physical Abuse, Self Harm by Proxy, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Written somewhere between metaphorically and stream of consciousness, but I think this merits it, if she dissociates and IDs with him and not her body she has some power here, no happy ending, references to psychological abuse, religious trauma, she just thinks about wanting that body to die so she's free, that's not normal for me so it's getting a part 2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:14:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,944</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28376154</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coldest_Fire/pseuds/Cut%20Out%20Stars</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After Angelus sires Drusilla, she has to find some way to cope with the things he (continually) does. The answer is simple: become him. By seeing through his eyes rather than her own, Dru finds power, if only over the rest of herself, in a twisted sense. </p><p>It’s a naughty secret—he’d be cross. He can’t stop her. She learned a while ago to leave him. Her eyes went all pretty and painted on, and she went somewhere past his eyes. Left him a doll with no strings. A pitiful thing.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Angelus/Drusilla (BtVS)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>These Violent Ends [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2154084</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Painted Eyes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So this fic is the product of me always writing something dark around Christmas. </p><p>A few little things first. </p><p>This fic is pretty much about Dru inhabiting Angelus' body one of the times he's using her, and hurting herself to feel like she has control over something. It's exactly what you expect from all the tags. The idea actually came because I was watching s2, and as you all know, in the rest of my fic, I can't seem to figure out the reason Dru in s2 seemed to want Angelus, at all? And all I could come up with is that it's a form of self-harm. And that exiting her body, and being him for a moment os a kind of fucked up freedom. So yeah. This won't be a head cannon that seeps into the rest of my fic, but this is arguably more canon to her dynamic with Angelus than how I write her in Tua Maxima Culpa. </p><p>The one thing I didn't do was call angelus Daddy, in her narration. She does it in canon. Somehow dissociation, rape, and self-harm were fine for me to write, but the daddy kink squicked me out. I also don't get how my brain works. </p><p>So yeah. I know myself enough to know that I'm going to end up writing a big long part 2 (as a second fic--and now apparently a third) in which Spike winds up involved in some part of this, and things have to change? We know I can't leave a sad ending for long.</p><p> </p><p>It's also on my pseud, because it's not considered 'canon' to the rest of my works--simply because I love Dru, and I don't want this for her, even if it felt very canon. So you can apply this HC to any of the fics on my main profile as Coldest Fire, but it's not going to be mentioned in them.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Something has angered him, the stars are gleeful. They sing and spit slews of coarse words. Coarse against her skin, not the least of the injuries she’ll take. And take. The stars say stretches of words about corpses, or perhaps bodies, or perhaps dolls—not a lot of difference between the three. He creates them.</p><p> </p><p>Miss Edith slumps, porcelain legs askew, dress riding up to show her little cloth body. Shameless. Her head tips off the shelf, eyes meeting Drusilla’s. She gets up, and in one swift movement, blindfolds her. “Not polite to stare,” she insists. One of her porcelain wrists is cracking, so for good measure, Drusilla wraps both in ribbon, and suspends them above her off a jewelry tree.</p><p> </p><p>The tree is sparse and wiry, covered in pretty things from prettier ladies that have died in the bed. It sits atop a scratched, dark brown wooden dresser, one with stories, but unwilling to spill them like contents out of drawers. It’s rude. The wardrobe contains an array of dresses, some dyed shades of red, some torn up the sides—rude to get in the way, certainly. She wonders if it’s seditious to fix the stitches.</p><p> </p><p>All else that remains in the room is the bed. Dark sheets—once light. Crusted with blood. A dusty, gauzy canopy that hides the pixies and lest in starlight, and of course, no windows. Drusilla hasn’t been allowed windows for four years. Naughty sunlight wanted to bite her fingers. The stars showed her the way.</p><p> </p><p>The sun is a star. It burns her fastest.</p><p> </p><p>Will it be gleeful, by morning, when he’s finished? Not likely. She’s not allowed windows, after all. It has to imagine.</p><p> </p><p>He’s coming. She hears it. She sees the light refracting in footsteps. Glass swords, and eyes, and she remembers everything. Would be so much easier if she could forget where all those colours come from. So much kinder when she forgot the names of each star—she rattled them off by rote, as she would a prayer, when she needed them to save her.</p><p> </p><p>They<em> laughed,</em> until she stopped asking. Always laughing, or else it was tears. Either makes sense. She’s pinned between her mortal coil and the abyss, and couldn’t sip the cracks into the sky, assuming she’d even light up.</p><p> </p><p>Perhaps stars like her are burning hunks of coal. Not a surprise she’s still full of glass.</p><p> </p><p>She lays down on the bed. The moment nears.</p><p> </p><p>The door upstairs slams open, and thunder rolls across the wooden floor. His lover isn’t there. He only goes straight for the steps the there was no one he cared for more. She isn’t going anywhere.</p><p> </p><p>Her door rips open. She’s against a wall. He told her he was god once, a reason for her to kneel. He didn’t burn like god. He hurt worse. The Angel was worse than anything any figures in the sky with all their mosaic eyes could inflict. Hands like Holy Water. She sees Miss Edith, blindfolded, strung up by her hands. She ought to learn a lesson. She goes in the closet too. Her porcelain limbs are for cracking and playing. What else is an unholy <em>thing</em> good for? A doll with no strings. She’s limp. She subsides.</p><p> </p><p>She hits the bed. It’s her mistake to flinch. His hand is in her hair, he’s taking handfuls of it, using her strings. She manages responses. He’s the worst angel—the one who thinks he’s God. He creates Hell, but not for himself. He drops her to the bed, and she falls back, like she’s made of porcelain and not flesh, and doesn’t feel.</p><p> </p><p>Her dress is in the way. Ordinarily, he’d just pull it up—only one thing worth his time. Tonight he feels more thorough. His hands tear her dress open like flesh—she’s seen those hands rend flesh. Why isn’t she bleeding? It feels wrong for there not to be red.</p><p> </p><p>She doesn’t want to be in her body. It’s a naughty secret—he’d be cross. He can’t stop her. She learned a while ago to leave him. Her eyes went all pretty and painted on, and she went somewhere into the stars. They spoke accusations—better than being down there with him. They the accusers, and he the punishment—didn’t matter that she deserved it. She understood that she deserved it—for existence, for being wrong, seeing things, damning places, people, edifices with herself. Certainly for the ways she hurt. Even more for the ways that she <em>didn’t</em>. Made her deserve it again.</p><p> </p><p>She learned to leave, and then she learned to <em>penetrate</em>. She has every right to, if he does it to her. See how he likes it when she doesn’t ask nicely. She’s inside him, in his hands, and his legs and his eyes. She can’t move him against him—last time the pixies dragged her through her shoulders, and she had to scrabble by bloody nails to get out of herself again. He was furious.</p><p> </p><p>She never tries try to move against him. Why would she? Her own body beneath them, all legs and elbows, a doll with no strings, splayed obscenely. Much too pale—his masterpiece, why so little paint? The eyes don’t see them—her little secret, who’d want to be a doll? Grey blue, too glassy for tears—those came earlier and later concurrently. In these moments, she appropriates the face of the accuser—no tears through his eyes. No pity for that thing.</p><p> </p><p>She hates the eyes. Wants it to stop looking. Wants it to stop <em>being</em>. What she looks down at is a broken doll, and she hates it with everything in her. It’s a sight—a site of contempt. All still with thick pink scars from fingers and claws. Blackened fingertips, her little secret—never could resist a blessing, perhaps one day he’d <em>forgive her trespasses.</em> Not a nice game to play with paint and water and knives. Ought to learn.</p><p> </p><p>In time they give a vicious growl. No preamble. He never cares to waste time. She pushes him deeper just to hear it hiss. She drags his nails through its skin. She paints it red. He’ll think it’s all his artistry—a shame he doesn’t see. She’s the one who’d destroy it with his body. She’s like him, not like it. She’s an angel, and not a broken doll. Its place is cracked, and splayed and hollow—had to be hollow, that was its use. The eyes in the glass and voices of the sky see what he doesn’t. She is not it if she ruins it— she’s the one <em>carving.</em></p><p> </p><p>She tastes her power over her sire with its blood in her mouth. His teeth refuse to tear out its throat. It isn’t fair. She wants it <em>gone</em>. That satisfies the eyes—getting fucked is a sin—it deserves the ways they both make it bleed. She ought always make it bleed. <em>Right and just.</em> His hands on its breasts. Lifeless flesh. A broken chest that doesn’t rise. He leaves welts, it chokes without breath. She grips harder. She has to own it. The only way to own a doll was power—the power eyes and swords and <em>Angel</em> got to hold—and power was ruthless, and cold. </p><p> </p><p>The lord didn’t spare it, why would the angel? Why would she?</p><p> </p><p>It’s so still. So dead. She wants it to be. That’s all it is for now—dead, desecrated, destroyed.</p><p> </p><p>It has a use. He’s close now. It’s all tense, all through the thighs, and stomach, and ribs. It feels him through. Deep enough, he’s trying to look for whatever was there when he killed her. He won’t find her. A shame she’s in him, a shame she’s violating him the same way, driving him into it like a natural disaster. It pleads, glassy eyes shut, whispers incoherently in pain. Their song, her litany—if it had a tongue it would beg, but she doesn’t give it voice. She’s here. She’s free of it. She isn’t there if she’s the one that breaks it, hurts it, rapes it. Rapes him even, inside him aiming him like a weapon.</p><p> </p><p>He’s making sounds now—spilling vulgarities into pools of names and accusations, defining what it is to him—what it is at all. He wanted to own it. He <em>defined</em> it—that’s dominion, as she knows. He can use it as he pleases, and he can’t stop her from being the venom behind the bite, the burn within the water. He can’t make her protect it. He tells it it is just a hole—three, he knows that well. That’s all it can be once it’s in use. There’s nothing good left of it, she gets to take it apart as much as he does.</p><p> </p><p>He pounds, pounds, pounds, her fingers digging into its shoulders—both of them come away bloody. It is a mess of violet, red, and old pink scars. It is nothing—she has no sympathy. A doll with cut strings. It seeps in all colours. That’s all it’s good for. The eyes don’t seep yet. They’re still made of glass the whole time. Dead fish.</p><p> </p><p>“Angelus,” there’s a call from the other room, “at what point does it become necrophilia?” Drusilla almost falls out—has concentration is broken. So is hers. She holds on—can’t get sent back.</p><p> </p><p>He laughs, “just because you don’t have the patience, Darla…” he returns. She knows his pride in his work.</p><p> </p><p>“Well, if you’re feeling patient,” she draws out the word, “I think I want your patience up here, bent over the couch.” It’s salacious. Darla can do that. Can bend him over the couch and fuck him into the upholstery, but she can’t be inside him this deep. She can’t own his flesh. She can’t be in his head, and his hands, and his cock, all equally bloody. However she intends to test him, she’ll never find this.</p><p> </p><p>He gets up, calling something back up the stairs. Doesn’t bother to dress. Darla likes him bloody. If he’s good, she might clean him up. Drusilla is losing him. He’s too far. The tie grows more tenuous. She tries to hold him back, pull him. It can’t be over. He isn’t finished with it, nor she him. She can never hold him back. She doesn’t get that anymore, nothing for him to take away for it. He reaches the stairs. It snaps.</p><p> </p><p>It <em>hurts. </em>The first thing she’s aware of is her insides. It’s as if there was a sword inside her, driven repeatedly into her. There’s almost enough blood, she supposes. He’s violent enough to do it—she’s desperate enough to help. Every muscle in the body is stiff from resistance, he shoulders and chest and stomach and thighs and neck all as bloody, all stinging loud enough she can’t hear the stars. She’s acutely aware she is leaking. It’s filthy. It hurts. It hurts like something as filthy ought. It’s worse—somehow much worse, she’s the one that did it. He was a sword in her body in her hand—an instrument of self-destruction. One day she’ll push it up between the ribs and get out for good.</p><p> </p><p>Until then, she’ll give it what it deserves every time because... because the other option is to be it. Is to care for it, protect it.</p><p> </p><p>She won’t be hurt by that again. Being torn open is easier.</p><p> </p><p>She made that choice tonight.</p><p> </p><p>She weeps into the pillow to the chorus of sound—the stars and the sun and the moon—Angelus and Darla, and whatever Darla’s brought home.</p>
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